Hot Rain and Loud Noises

Whoa!

Greetings from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. It is awesome here. It was quite the journey from Southern California to Santo Domingo, but it has been well worth it.

The weather has been spectacular (I have not stopped sweating since I arrived), the people are spectacular (My host momma Ramona and my training group and trainers), the food is great (Yucca and plantains are delicious), and it is very, very loud (which of course, José loves).

Here is a little low'down on the island the peace corps here. As soon as we got here the Country Director (CD) Romeo Massey told us that we have the best peace corps assignment in the world. It is a very small island with great weather, beaches, and people. Since the island is so small the furthest assignment is maybe a 5 hour bus ride from the capital where many of the volunteers take time off to meet and go off on other excursions. They encourage people to come visit in order to take some of the culture of the island back to the states and leave some of their own culture here for the Dominicans to enjoy. YOu work very closely with other volunteers, we have a huge thanksgiving celebration in the capital where we cook a traditional thanksgiving dinner with all volunteers in country. We go out for 4th of july and all that good stuff. A couple of volunteers came to talk to us yesterday and they seemed to be having a BLAST. in their training class, 41 out of 52 stayed for the whole duration of service. Which makes me very excited.

I arrived on Thursday and started training and getting shots right away. I miss everyone from the US but there is just so much going on here. Yesterday was my first big thunderstorm which I throroughly enjoyed with my new buddy Cameron, from Arizona, Ryan, from near Temecula, and my host brother Gabriel, who is super rad, 11 and loves to dance andplay guitar. We then played a game of wiffle ball with our other American friend, Dean, who is training with us, in the rain. It was awesome. ONly day two, and I´m already playing some ball. STOKED.

Training seems like it is going to be quite intense, but I hope that I will be able to make some time to write some e'mails and keep my facebook updated for now. It about 3 weeks I am off to community based training where I go into a rural community and train for my particular job. Being able to speak Spanish has been a HUGE advantage. There are some people here who do not speak any spanish, but we have 5 hours of Spanish lessons a day and we all live with host families, apparently most people pick it up pretty quickly, but the dominicans speak super fast.

More will come later, I´ve only been here four days and it is still very hot and humid. but I´m LOVING it. I think it will only grow. I will post more later.

With lots of love,

José